It was silly of them to announce that it would be a ‘human rights’ prison in the first place. The whole point of prison is that the sentenced person has forfeited his or her right to be free to be in the community. There is always going to be tension between what prisoners and the community perceive as rights and ‘freedoms’.

However, clearly more money needs to be put in to address Court delays, lengthy remand times and inappropriate mixing of certain categories of prisoners (which requires flexible space). In other states, these sorts of changes didn’t come about until after people who were incarcerated simply for non-payment of traffic fines were murdered by other prisoners whilst on remand. I hope we don’t have to have that sort of crisis to trigger proper resources.